“That’s a good analysis.”
Mrs. Cushman flushed and said shortly, “It’s not mine. Rose said it about herself.”
Frank was not surprised. Rose had admitted her faults with the cheerful unconcern of someone who has no intention of trying to change them. This is me, Rose said, in effect. This is what I did and why I did it and tomorrow I may do it again.
He said, “What did she do on Sunday after I left?”
“Stayed in her room for a while. About two o’clock she had a phone call and right after that off she went, looking kind of worried.”
“Who took the call?”
“She did. When the phone rang, she came running down the steps like a bat out of hell, shouting, it’s for me, I’ll get it. That’s not the first time it happened, either. You see now what I mean about her acting secrety?”
“Yes.”
“There’s more, too. Last week — Wednesday it was, I remember distinctly — Wednesday night Miss Henderson came home from work and said she’d seen Rose walking by herself out on the breakwater. Now you know Rose, she just hated the ocean, never had a good word to say for it. What was she doing out there?”
“Meeting someone, perhaps.”
“Exactly what I thought. Exactly. So the next morning at breakfast I said to her, meaning to be funny, I said, well, I didn’t know you was so fond of physical culture, Miss French, that you go prancing up and down the breakwater of an evening. You know what she did then? — told me to mind my own business. And that’s not all. She said if a lot more people did a lot more walking, they wouldn’t get fat as pigs. Meaning me. Real venomous she said it.” Mrs. Cushman reached for her tea as an antidote. “I’ve taken a lot of things from that woman, but that was the unkindliest blow of all because it so happens that I’ve lost two pounds in the last month. If you’re born skinny the way Rose was, it’s no credit to stay skinny.”
Frank, who was born skinny, agreed. He ate like a horse and Miriam gained weight.
“Well, I oughtn’t to take up your time like this,” Mrs. Cushman said. “But I just felt I had to tell somebody about how peculiar she was acting.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“I didn’t want to go to the police, it’s no place for a respectable woman.”
“I suppose they came here to look at her room?”
“They did, Tuesday afternoon before supper. Rose had left a lot of stuff behind and they went through it. But it was all just junk that she was too lazy to throw away, left it for me to clean up.”
“Did you clean it up?”
“No, they wouldn’t let me. They said I had to wait till after the inquest. Well, the inquest’s over.” Mrs. Cushman rose, giving her skirt a decisive little tug. “I might as well get at it.”
“Perhaps I could be of some help.”
“You? Well, I don’t know. It’s real nice of you to offer.”
“I didn’t offer out of niceness. I’m more curious about Rose than you are.”
“It’s funny how she had that effect on people. You sort of couldn’t believe she was real, and then she turned out to be realer than anybody, you know?”
“Yes, I know.” It was the same conclusion he and Miriam had reached, put into different words. Frank preferred Mrs. Cushman’s: Rose was realer than anybody.
He followed Mrs. Cushman up the stairs. She paused at the top and glanced uneasily over her shoulder, as if she half-suspected that the footsteps behind her were not Frank’s.
“I don’t relish the thought of going through her things,” she said in a whisper. “It was all right when she was alive. But a dead person’s things are creepy, they make you wonder what it’s all about.”
Mrs. Cushman didn’t get her chance to wonder. Rose’s room was locked, and the door was triple-sealed, across the keyhole and at the top and bottom, with identical printed notices: Sealed by order of the County Administrator.
8
Rose’s funeral — paid for not by Willett or the County Administrator, but by Dalloway — was held in Malgradi’s chapel on Friday afternoon. The solemnity of the occasion was marred by several small incidents which Rose herself might have thoroughly enjoyed.
In the first place no one knew what minister to ask to conduct the services, since Rose’s attendance at church had been limited to getting married, and she had left no will containing funeral instructions. Still no decision had been reached by noon, so Malgradi called a conference in his office. Malgradi liked conferences and he invited everyone he could think of who might be concerned with Rose’s send-off: Greer, who declined without reason; the County Administrator, who said the estate was now out of his hands and he had no jurisdiction or interest; and Frank and Dalloway, who accepted the invitation.
Dalloway was in a difficult mood. He said that he thought a religious service was unnecessary, inasmuch as Rose had been an atheist when he knew her and probably still was when she died.
Malgradi made protesting little noises, like an alarmed rabbit. “If she was an atheist, all the more reason why we should give her a boost.”
“You asked my opinion. I gave it.”
“Perhaps, as a girl, she was baptized? Or confirmed?”
“Never.”
It was finally decided, under Frank’s guidance, that they choose the minister in a fair and impartial way, by looking through the yellow pages of the phone book until they found a likely-sounding name. The Reverend Pickering was selected because Pickering was the name of Malgradi’s mother-in-law.
Pickering was sent for in a hurry and given a brief resumé of Rose’s career and character. The choice turned out to be somewhat unfortunate. The Reverend was quite elderly, his eyesight was poor and the lights in Malgradi’s chapel where Rose was resting were dim and flattering. Through this combination of circumstances, Pickering got the impression that Rose was a young woman, and having no time to prepare anything new, he fell back on his cut-off-in-the-flower-of-her-youth eulogy.
Sensing disaster, Malgradi immediately stepped up the volume of the organ music to drown Pickering out, or at least soften the discrepancies. Pickering was a hard man to drown. He had competed during his lifetime with epidemics of coughs and whispers, squalls of babies, giggles of choir boys, and even personal attacks in the form of spitballs from the gallery and peashooters from the vestry. He had no intention of giving ground to a mere organ.
By shouts and pantomime he indicated to the rather dazed audience that Rose was a flower and only the fairest flowers were plucked to grace the garden of the infinite.
Hearing this, Mrs. Cushman, who had arrived late and taken a seat in the back row, assumed that she had somehow come to the wrong funeral and she immediately rustled out again to look for the right one.
“Let us pray,” Pickering said, and pray he did, for the soul of this lovely young woman to enter the eternal glory and eternal youth.
Malgradi did his best. He coughed, shuffled his feet, and under cover of his hand, made faces at a small boy on the aisle in the faint hope that the boy would become frightened and start screaming and all hell would break loose. The boy merely stuck out his tongue at Malgradi in a friendly way and refocused his attention on Pickering.
Malgradi could stand the agony no longer. He slipped out into the corridor. Here he met Mrs. Cushman who had been wandering in and out of rooms finding out a good deal about the embalming business. The experience had unnerved her and left her quite unprepared to cope with this sudden meeting.
“Eeeee,” Mrs. Cushman said, and made a frantic beeline for the nearest door, which happened to be that of the chapel. So she didn’t miss Rose’s funeral after all.